


Stepping Backwards Through The Snow

by AntivanCrafts



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Slow Burn, are you ready for post traumatic stress disorder because i am, champion carver hawke, eventual romo but certainly not in the first chapter, silly templars trauma is for kids!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 07:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10871742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntivanCrafts/pseuds/AntivanCrafts
Summary: Following the path of the champion of Kirkwall, Carver Hawke, beginning with the deepest, lowest point of the Deep Roads expedition all the way to the heights of his ringing voice over the City of Chains.





	Stepping Backwards Through The Snow

Dorothea Hawke's legendarily bull-headed stubbornness won out over the taint for almost three days before she finally faltered. She had paled over the past several days, he would later think to himself, or so it would seem in hindsight, but then, they all had. From exhaustion, from grief, from pain of all sorts. So it had not seemed entirely out of character for her usual unflagging stride to gradually drop back bit by bit until she had fallen behind Carver and Varric and Isabela, or for her to fall silent. His sister was known to be terse, known to be ill tempered and brusque and all manner of even less flattering words he could have picked out of a hat, words he himself had hurled at her not even a day before, so he had at first taken the lengthening pause after her last words to be a welcome reprieve from ordering them on faster, harder, longer. Had even found himself breathing a sigh of relief when he heard her draw in a breath behind him, only to ease it out on a long, wordless exhale that shook only slightly on the exhale.

From impatience, he had thought.

An hour later, perhaps less, his sister stumbled. Carver barely noticed, had been several feet ahead and still going when Dorothea called out his name in a tone he had never before heard from her. Some unidentified emotion that tasted like dread bumped chill fingers up the knobs of his spine, drawing out a full body shiver that ended as he twisted mid step just in time to see Dorothea's eyes roll up into her head as she dropped like a doll whose strings had been cut.

Carver didn't remember if he made a sound, didn't remember moving. One moment, he was standing beside Varric, and the next, he was lifting Dorothea's head and shoulders up off of the cave floor. His voice was hoarse when he spoke to her, asked if she was hurt. Maybe he'd yelled, after all. 

Dorothea didn't.

She didn't tell him about a wound, but she didn't have to. No one had to tell him what the sickly, skeletal fingers clawing bark trails across her skin meant. He had been at Ostagar, been outside Lothering. He knew what it meant. Knew intimately the horrible, wracking pains that would overtake you for long hours, days, before death claimed you, if it did at all. Not everyone was so lucky. 

He could feel Isabela hovering just beyond Varric's shoulder, but she never said a word, to him or to Dorothea, just gripped a hand at Varric's shoulder and led him away. Carver ought to have been grateful, should have been, but at this moment, he could only stare helplessly at the woman who had changed his diapers, who had nursed him through every fever and cold and childhood broken heart, and wonder when he had learned to pull away from her so hard and she him, until their touching now burned cold, like first touching boiling water.

 _It is a slow death_ , the voice of Aveline's late husband murmured in his mind, and Carver closed his eyes briefly as he allowed himself a breath, two. Inhale.

Feel her.

Exhale. 

She is here, with you, now.

Inhale.

"Sod it all," Carver mouthed, barely sounds at all. "Haven't you taken enough? Are you so selfish?"

And then Dorothea moved, trying to get up, to keep going, and the moment was over, Carver shoving the thought away as he held Dorothea close with near desperate strength. Her hair was plastered to her head with sweat, and Carver smoothed it back with shaking hands that curled into claws, halfway to a fist. He bent over Dorothea with a strangled sound that seemed to come from the pit of his stomach, all frustration and terror that came out twisted with unreasoning anger. "You can't," he whispered. The words were thin, strained between teeth grit so hard his jaw ached. "You can't do this. I won't allow it."

"'m fine," Dorothea said faintly, her voice shaking as she tried to inject her usual confidence into every word. It would have been far more convincing if he hadn't been able to see the taint pump through blackened, sluggish veins. He stared in horrified fascination for a moment, fancying that he could see it chase itself through the cracks and pores of her skin like spilled ink before he shook his head with a jerk. 

"Why," he said louder, twin spots of color flaring high on his cheeks as he gave her a shake, "why do you have to be so selfish? You're _dying_ , Dora, you-" He cut himself off on a sharp noise. His fingers were clenching tight in her hair. He must have been hurting her, but she never made a sound.

Dorothea's mouth trembled slightly as she looked up at him. Her eyes were wide and white around the edges, and he slowly became aware of moisture etching trails through the dried dirt and dust on her cheeks. It wasn't sweat. "Its my job." Every word seemed an effort that had to be pulled out of her, she shook so within his arms. Like the slightest breath would blow her away. "Its what I'm _for_." She shook when she said that, too, and he couldn't tell if it was the taint wringing her dry and empty, or whatever drive had chased his older sister across twenty-five years and two continents, but whatever it was would have to wait its fucking turn.

"Its a slow death, Dora." He said it slow, and halting, and could hardly bear to look at her, but he knew, too, that he could not look away now. That she deserved this much. That she deserved far more than this, but that looking her in the eyes as she died was all that he could give her. "You can't- you can't just- push it away like it isn't happening like you've done every day of your life. This is real, Dora."

She tried to smile, and in a lot of ways, that was worse. She smiled so rarely, his sister, and chose now of all times. When she was sick, when she was dying, when she thought it would help him do what she could not, which was to get up and walk out of this cavern. "Always wanted to be a warden when I was small. Let me have my calling."

"For once in your miserable life, let me help you!" Carver was breathing hard, and his chest was tight. He didn't know whether he wanted to strangle his sister or hold her close, or maybe both at the same time. A dozen dozen deaths from Ostagar he usually managed to avoid in his waking hours sat beside him now, and he knew, in that bone-deep way that you knew summer would follow spring would follow winter, that Dorothea's death would haunt his dreams, too. 

He felt so tired then, and so, so old.

"Dora," he tried to say, but it emerged a croak, bare and shivering on the verge of a sob. "Let me help you. Just this one. Please."

Dorothea pressed her lips together into the thin line he recognized from a thousand lectures, ten thousand, and he had to strangle a sudden burst of hysterical, unreasoning laughter that threatened to bubble over. And in between one breath and the next, the length of a lifetime, it all fell away as she sagged against his chest with a soft sound that could not have been a sob. His proud, stubborn, irritable, beautiful sister had never cried in front of him in his life, not once. She was scared, he realized with a sickening pang in his chest that left him feeling raw and scraped open worse than any wound he saw behind his eyelids in the dark. She was afraid to die. Did not want to die.

But she was, right now, and neither she or Carver or the Maker themself could change that.

"Together," he felt more than heard her say against his chest, and he shuddered out her name, her real name, the one their father had pressed between their hands on the secret holidays with the warning that no outsider must ever learn them or they would surely die. 

Carver swallowed hard past the knot that allowed no words, and lowered Dorothea onto the cavern floor. "Ta Nir." She lifted eyes that had gone more yellow than grey, eyes that he remembered in browns and in golds and in laughter, as he pulled out his knife. It was new, hardly broken in, and shone dully in the torchlight in echo of the grin he'd had when she had presented it to him the day before the expedition.

 _"Don't want you getting the taint because you took twelve years to chop through a hurlok with a dull blade,"_ she'd scoffed, not looking at him, but the corner of her mouth had twisted up at the corner when he took it in his hand, as he did now. As they did.

"I see you," he told her with a voice that shook and a hand that was steady. "You will be remembered." Her eyes had fallen half closed, but she kept looking at him as he helped her line the blade up where it would be lethal. Her hand was weak on the blade, unsteady, and he had to help hold the blade at the correct angle the way she had done for him when first teaching him to hold a sword. He held it there for the space of a breath, a lifetime, and then drove the blade across her throat.


End file.
